After completing the reading assignments, you should be able to:
Tindall and Shi, pp. 713-758
Social Fabric, pp. 2-17.
Attempts to reconstruct and unify the Union after the Civil War actually began before the completion of hostilities. Much of the early work of reconstruction dealt with the legal questions of bringing the defeated states back into the Union. It is important to remember that when the rebelling Southern states seceded from the Union, they claimed that they had a legal right to do so. Logic would dictate that these Southern rebel states would therefore accept that they would have to be formally readmitted to the Union. This was not the case. Leaders of these states claimed after the war that their states were still part of the Union. The Union states, however, claimed that secession was illegal in 1861 and thus should have taken the position after the war that the Southern rebel states were still part of the Union. However, some Northern radical Republicans, such as Senator Charles Sumner and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, demanded in 1865 that the rebel states be treated as conquered provinces and follow a readmission process.
President Lincoln attempted to ignore this debate. In 1862, he appointed provisional governors for parts of the rebellious South that were already occupied by federal troops. By the end of 1863, Union armies controlled large parts of the Confederacy and a Union victory seemed almost certain. Because President Lincoln desired a rapid reconciliation of the warring sections, he issued a general policy of reconstruction on December 8, 1863. Lincoln based his right to make such a policy on presidential pardoning powers granted by the Constitution. Lincoln proposed that all Southerners, except for a few high ranking officials, could reinstate themselves as United States citizens by taking a loyalty oath. Once ten percent of the voters from a rebel state's 1860 national election took such an oath, a new state government could be formed. Lincoln proclaimed that these new governments had to be "republican" in form, recognize the "permanent freedom" of blacks, and provide blacks with an education. This proclamation did not give blacks the vote. Not only did Lincoln's "ten percent plan" show his moderation and lack of vindictiveness, but also his political wisdom. Lincoln reasoned that eventually Southern representatives would again sit in Congress, so he wanted to lay the groundwork for a smooth transition by not alienating Southern sensibilities.
Within a short time of Lincoln's announcement of his "ten percent plan," three occupied rebel states followed Lincoln's formula and prepared to send representatives to Congress. Congress was controlled by Lincoln's own party, the Republicans, who refused to seat the new representatives from the rebellious Southern states. One of the major reasons for Congressional reluctance to follow Lincoln's plan was that most congressmen were concerned by the broad expansion of presidential powers during the war. Lincoln had assumed more presidential power than any president since the Democrat Andrew Jackson. Few congressmen wished to see the president continue to exercise such broad powers after the war, so they blocked Lincoln's plan. Furthermore, many radical Republicans had been abolitionists and had been at odds with Lincoln over his reluctance to move against the institution of slavery at the beginning of the war. They were concerned that Lincoln's plan did not deal with the status of freedmen or former slaves.
Radical Republicans in Congress took the initiative on reconstruction issues and introduced the Wade-Davis bill in July, 1864. This bill was far more stringent than Lincoln's plan for reconstruction. According to this bill, only after fifty percent of the citizens of a rebellious state had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Union could reconstruction begin. Congress, not the president, would decide when reconstruction was complete. The Wade-Davis bill also called for the rebel states to repudiate any Confederate war debt incurred.
President Lincoln did not agree with the terms of the Wade-Davis bill and exercised a pocket veto to cancel it. (In this case, Congress had passed the bill and then adjourned before ten days had passed. According to the Constitution, in such an instance the president may veto a measure without explanation simply by not signing it or pocketing it.) When Lee surrendered at Appomatox, there was no formal reconstruction policy in force, although Lincoln showed signs of moving toward an accommodation with the radicals.
A Southern Democrat vs. Some Northern Republicans
By the national election of 1864, it had become apparent that Union forces would win the Civil War in the near future. As a gesture of bipartisanship, President Lincoln named Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson as his vice-presidential running mate. Like Lincoln, Johnson had grown up in frontier poverty, but had been illiterate until as an adult he asked a schoolteacher to teach him to read and write. Ultimately he married the schoolteacher. Although Johnson was a Southerner and a Democrat, the radical Republicans were unconcerned when he became president after Lincoln's assassination. Johnson had long harangued well-to-do Southern planters and as a result, the radical Republicans wrongly thought that Johnson would support their causes. It was not until the summer of 1865, when Johnson began to pardon prominent Confederates and make them eligible to hold office, that Republicans began to realize that their assumptions were wrong. When four former Confederate generals came to Washington as newly elected congressmen along with the new senator from Georgia, former Confederate Vice-President Alexander F. Stephans, Republicans in Congress refused to seat them.
President Johnson was a traditional Southern Jacksonian Democrat, as Republicans were to learn by the end of 1866. He had little sympathy for traditional Republican policies such as a protective tariff, the Homestead Act, and a central route for the transcontinental railroad, which was under construction at the time. Furthermore, he was prejudiced against blacks, as were most poor southern whites. Johnson disliked Southern slaveholders and was glad that slavery had ended, but he did not consider blacks to be the equal of whites.
Most radical Republicans realized that if their party were going to remain in power, they would need to guarantee black civil rights in the South. If blacks were given the vote, they would likely vote for the party that had enfranchised them. By early 1866, Johnson made his prejudice clear by vetoing the Freedman's Bureau bill. Congress had passed this bill to extend the tenure of the Freedman's Bureau until a reconstruction policy could be agreed on. Johnson vetoed this measure on the grounds that a military government was unconstitutional in the Union, and he considered the defeated Southern states to be part of the Union.
In March, 1866, Congress passed a bill that would have granted full citizenship to freedmen. This was also vetoed by the president. In this case, Johnson interpreted the Constitution to say that each state, not Congress, was to define the terms of citizenship in its own state. In both cases, Johnson's interpretation of the Constitution was reasonable, but his grasp of political reality in the South was not. The use of "Black Codes" by Southern states to repress blacks, as well as racial riots in some Southern cities during the summer of 1866, indicated to Republican congressmen that the reconstruction stalemate between the president and Congress had to be resolved.
Resentment of President Johnson's exercise of the veto power reached such proportions in Congress that the Radical Republicans picked up enough support to pass the Freedman's Bureau bill and the Civil Rights Bill over the president's vetoes. Enforcement of the terms of both measures was given to the army. In the case Ex parte Miligan (1866) the Supreme Court said, however, that the military had no jurisdiction in areas in which hostilities had ceased. Faced with the possibility of defeat, Radical Republicans decided to propose a constitutional amendment in June, 1866. The Fourteenth Amendment would have disallowed laws such as the Black Codes, although it also promised to eliminate Northern state laws that forbade blacks from voting. President Johnson decided to make the amendment a campaign issue in the congressional election of 1866. Johnson went on a Midwestern speaking tour that backfired. Most of his candidates were defeated. The Republican party, now led by Radicals, controlled more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses. Control of reconstruction thus passed from the executive branch to Congress.
Top of Page | Bottom of PageCongressional Control of Reconstruction
The shift of reconstruction control from the executive branch to the legislative branch introduced a period of more vocal Congresses and weaker presidents until the end of the nineteenth century. Congress passed the first of its reconstruction acts on March 2, 1867. This act divided the former Confederate states, except for Tennessee, into five military districts, each headed by a general of the United States Army. These governments were to protect civil rights for all, maintain order, and supervise the administration of justice. Military rule in these districts would end when the former Confederate states framed and adopted a new state constitution. The constitutions were required to guarantee blacks the vote and disenfranchise broad groups of former Confederates. Constitutions were to be approved by the United States Congress. Finally, the reconstructed states had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. When these demands had been met, a former Confederate state's representatives could be admitted to the United States Congress and military rule would end. President Johnson vetoed this act, but his veto was quickly overturned by Congress.
This first reconstruction act was too vague in its guidelines for developing the new state governments. Additionally, the former Confederate states hoped that the Supreme Court would declare the act unconstitutional. They preferred a period of military rule to giving blacks the vote. A second reconstruction act was passed by Congress that required military authorities in the defeated regions to register voters and supervise the election of delegates to constitutional conventions. A third reconstruction act was passed to clarify these procedures.
Still, white Southerners resisted reconstruction. The reconstruction acts required that state constitutions had to be passed by a majority of the registered voter turnout from the 1860 presidential election. Southerners reasoned that by not voting at all, they could defeat these constitutions by default. To remedy this obstruction, Congress changed the law in March, 1868, to allow the constitutions to be ratified by a majority of the voters in the constitutional ratifying elections. In June, 1868, Arkansas became the first Confederate state to comply with the reconstruction acts and be readmitted to the Union.
Radical Republicans became so powerful and embittered toward the former Confederate states and President Johnson that they attempted a revision of the federal government that almost destroyed the balance of government between the executive, judicial, and legislative branches. Laws passed between 1866 and 1868 increased the authority of Congress over the army, the process of amending the Constitution, the cabinet, and lesser appointive offices. Congress gave itself the right to call extra sessions, a right that had previously been exercised by the president. The size of the Supreme Court was reduced, as well as the range of its jurisdiction over civil rights cases. The Tenure of Office Act of 1867 became the major catalyst to the impeachment articles brought against President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Although President Johnson was acquitted at the Senate trial, his personal reputation, as well as the reputation of the office of president, was severely damaged.
Several days after the acquittal of President Johnson, General Ulysses S. Grant was nominated as the 1868 Republican presidential candidate. The Democrats nominated Governor Horatio Seymore of New York. Grant won an easy electoral college victory because of the estimated 500,000 black votes cast for him. These votes were made possible by the reconstruction acts. These election results made it clear to Republicans that the black vote was important to the success of their party. To protect blacks' voting rights, the Fifteenth Amendment was sent to the states for ratification in 1869. This amendment forbade states to deny the vote to anyone "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
President Grant's philosophy was that the president should obey and enforce the laws and let the people correct any error committed by their representatives through the election process. Furthermore, Grant disliked politicians and had very little to do with them. Yet he had some unscrupulous friends who had duped him. Although Grant did not appear to have been involved in the scandals, he also did nothing to stop them or to prevent them from happening. Shortly after Grant's reelection in 1872, the first of several scandals became public.
By the election of 1876, the Republicans, tired of scandal in high offices, selected Rutherford B. Hayes as their candidate, in part because of his impeccable reputation. The Democrats selected Samuel J. Tilden, who also had a good reputation and had been responsible for breaking up the Tweed Ring in his home state of New York. Even the election of 1876 proved to be somewhat crooked, however. The eventual "Compromise of 1877" sounded the death knell for reconstruction. White persons in the United States had tired of the "great experiment" of reconstruction in the South and were ready to turn their attention westward to new promise and wealth. The "Compromise of 1877" brought about a low period for blacks in the United States.
Was the reconstruction of 1862 to 1877 a failure? Many recent historians have argued that it was and that a second reconstruction in the mid-twentieth century was in fact necessary and successful. Finally, civil rights for American blacks and other minorities were guaranteed by law. Other historians, however, have argued that the reconstruction efforts of the nineteenth century were not a failure, but in fact successful as far as they went. They argue that civil rights for minorities could not have been attained in that day and time but had to await a second push for civil rights in the 1960s.
The following questions have been provided to give you additional aid in determining whether you have mastered the concepts covered in this lesson. The study questions following each selection in Social Fabric are also helpful.
Part I. Definition of Terms
Provide the context and historical significance of five of the following terms (five points each).
Freedmen's Bureau
Wade-Davis Bill
scalawags
Radical Reconstruction
poll taxes
Ku Klux Klan
"40 Acres and a Mule"
"forfeited rights theory"
Radical Republicans
Tenure of Office Act
sharecropping
crop lien
Ten-Percent Plan
carpetbagger
Presidential Reconstruction
impeachment
Redeemer
Crédit Mobilier
Part II. Essay
Answer one of the following questions. You have access to ample information, so make sure your answers are thorough. Three to five pages with an introduction and conclusion will be required to treat the problems and issues arising from each question.